Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

*Spoilers ahead.  Read at your own Risk.*

This novella is the first non-science-fiction/non-fantasy work of Le Guin’s that we have read. It is, however, pure Le Guin, as it deals with one of her central themes: how two people connect across the gulf of our own minds and experiences.

When we began it, neither Ann nor I was particularly excited, since it felt so very much like a young adult novel, with a wise-cracking teen narrator who is both smart and lonely, feeling like a freak among his “normal” peers.  It’s not really until Natalie enters the picture that the novel takes off.  Once our two protagonists met on the bus, we knew we were going to be okay because Le Guin was going to do one of the things that she does best.

The length and limits of the novella speak of Le Guin’s focus and her ability to get right to the heart of the matter.  We are used to Le Guin’s stories taking their time, unfolding gradually and organically.  There is no such wandering in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.  It’s not that there’s rushing or shut-off avenues; it’s just that this is a story about the complicated nature of love between a young man and a young woman.  The novella could easily have been expanded by exploring other facets of young adulthood as so many young adult novels have done, looking at all the tough parts of growing up.  I appreciate Le Guin’s unswerving attention to Owen and Natalie’s relationship.

I also appreciate that this is not a story about how Natalie saved or ruined Owen’s life.  Natalie does save Owen’s life in her own way, but her purpose in the story is not just to save Owen.  Natalie is a woman of focus and ambition who does not want anything to distract from those dreams.  Owen’s story is of how he learned he was not alone in the world and that he should not sell out his own dreams to live the life his parents (and by extension, society) wants him to live.  Natalie doesn’t just listen to and advise Owen; she is a living example of what Owen needs to see.  Natalie is a friend and an inspiration.

The crisis of the story is when the phantom of romantic love begins to haunt Owen’s mind.  As Owen says, he convinces himself that his fondness for Natalie is capital-L Love, and he begins to play the part of the lover, if only in his own mind.  This pressure echoes the other pressures in Owen’s life, the pressure to live by a script written by someone else.  The things he does as a lover—mooning over her looks, writing poetry, quietly aching in his heart—are all things that American pop culture defines as the behavior of love.

What I love is that in their healing discussion, Natalie confesses that she made mistakes too, that Owen is not the only one who reacted poorly to the love growing between them.  She says, 

The way I figured, I didn’t want to get really involved with anybody.  Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that.  I’m pretty young, and there’s all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it’s the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can.  I can’t take anything lightly.  Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. . . . I thought we’d really made it, and everybody’s wrong when they say men and women can’t be friends.

Owen apologizes for “pushing the sex stuff in where it didn’t belong,” but Natalie counters, ”Yeah, but it did belong. . . . You can’t just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I’m busy just now.”  She felt the sexual tension and desire too, and her error was to ignore it because it was inconvenient.  But this realization is not followed by a declaration of love and restructuring of plans.  Natalie’s solution appears to be to move forward as before but with the full awareness of what they both feel.  That’s amazing, and beautiful, and everything I expect from Le Guin. 

So many writers skip past the difficult conversations needed to foster true connection between people, using the pressures of love to elide the hard work of communication.  The joy of this novel is that that conversation is made the climactic moment of the story.  As a writer you can’t do that unless you know exactly what you believe about human relationships and love itself.  Le Guin knows, and I can listen to her talk about it all day.

Destruction and Survival on the Lathe of Heaven

There are tons of spoilers ahead, so tread knowingly.

The Lathe of Heaven is one of Le Guin’s shorter novels, but it packs a big punch.  It’s a dystopic novel in which the dystopia is always changing because living in this Utopia is a man whose dreams change the very fabric of reality.  It’s is trippy and heavy, funny and irreverent, sad and thought-provoking.

As in the best of her novels, in The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin uses her unique world to tell the story of very human characters.  There are three main characters in this story.  George Orr, in his late 20s or early 30s is the man whose dreams are at the center of the novel.  He has been having his “effective” dreams since he was 15 or 16, but they didn’t cause him much worry until four years before the start of the novel.  We learn that something happened that April—we never know what, only that it was an action that Orr worries was unjustified—that made Orr fear the power of his dreams to change reality.  At that point he started to take drugs to keep himself from dreaming.  As the novel begins, George is delusional from having taken a dangerous combination of drugs and is ordered by the state to go to Voluntary Therapy to avoid a sentence.

Dr. Haber is the therapist George is assigned to.  Haber is an oneirologist, a scientist of sleep and dreams.  He is a man of quick judgments and conviction.  After the first session with George, Haber learns that the young man’s dreams can indeed change the world.  Haber wants to learn how George does it and wants to use the power of those dreams to make the world a better place.  As the novel starts, the earth’s population is stretched to its limit while climate change was ruined food production so there is very little for very many people.  But George’s dream-power is like the cursed monkey paw, and every changes Haber brings about is accompanied by an unintended shift.  For example, Haber instructs George to dream that there is plenty of elbow room for all, and the past is rewritten so that there was a major population crash, wiping out 6 million people.  Haber instructs George to dream of peace, and history is rewritten so that all the countries of Earth are united . . . against an alien species that has occupied our moon for years.

Heather Lelache is an attorney in Portland, Oregon (where the novel is set), a hard-nosed attorney who takes civil rights cases.  George comes to her when he suspects that Haber is using George’s dream-power against George’s will.  While our first impression of her is that she is as strong-willed as Dr. Haber, her dismissal of George upon first meeting of him gives way to gentler feelings and a drive to understand.  She observes one of George’s sessions with Dr. Haber in the name of the ACLU, making sure that the new technology Haber is devising to work with George’s dreams is safe and legal.  When George dreams, only he remembers the past truths as well as the present truths, unless someone is with him when he dreams, in which case that person two holds memory of the old and new world.  By witnessing the session, Lelache learns the truth about what is happening.

These three characters and their relationships make up all the energy and drama of the story, all with the backdrop of a rotating horror of global strife and tragedy.  No matter what George dreams, the climate has been thoroughly ruined by corporate greed and human apathy.  Man, I would love to see a quality mini-series made of this book—it is perfect for what television can do today.

For all that, what is the book about? 

Each chapter begins with a literary quote, most of which come from Zhuangzi, both the author and the book.  I was unfamiliar with Zhuangzi or his writing, so I did a little research.  Zhuangzi is a philosopher, and his tales are about the mystery of the nature of reality and how to live in an uncertain world.  The title of the book, The Lathe of Heaven, comes from chapter 23 of Zhuangzi, and is included as the quote at the head of chapter 3 of the book: 

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven.  They do not learn this by learning.  They do not work it by working.  They do not reason it by using reason.  To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.  Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven (26).

The Lathe of Heaven, taken as a whole, is a kind of parable that could appear in Zhuangzi, if Zhuangzi was a modern work of science fiction.  The philosophy at its core is one of balance and acceptance, of being a part of the world even as you see yourself as apart from it.  That quote above is about accepting and being a part of the world not through human action, but by being.  To not be, to push for your own ends will lead to destruction upon the lathe of heaven.  Be shaped by the will of heaven.  To fight it and try to be the lathe yourself will only end in horrors.  Which is, of course, precisely what happens to Dr. Haber.  He wishes to push his own will on the heavens and pays the ultimate price for it, and makes a huge chunk of the world pay that price as well.

Orr, on the other hand, is a son of heaven, in the sense of the quote above.  George is the living embodiment of balance, as we learn in chapter nine, when Haber tells him about the results of his personality tests, calling him “the man in the middle of the graph.”  For Haber, to be so centered is to be “self-cancel[ing]”: “You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.”  A colleague of Haber’s proposes a different reading: “he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment,” a notion Haber finds laughable, but that we can see the wisdom of. We are told early on that 

Orr was not a fast reasoner.  In fact, he was not a reasoner.  He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heave ground of existence. He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections, like a plumber (39).

See how that connects to the sons of heaven?  He does not reason it by using reason.  He does not work it by working.  And he is only too happy to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood.  After the aliens come to Earth, George learns from them and rediscover this inner peace by asking for their help.  George snaps back to a feeling of balance that abandoned him four years ago when he began trying to control his dreaming.  For nearly 10 years before that, he dreamed easily and the world didn’t suffer.  (I admit that is an uncertain statement to some degree, insofar as the world kinda sucked, and we have no idea how George affected reality before the start of the novel.  But whatever his dreams did or didn’t do, we know that the lathe of heaven is turning and shaping him, using him to shape the world, in the philosophy of the text.)

I’ve got much more buzzing around in my head than I have time to write right now.  I suspect that George Orr’s name is a nod to George Orwell and simultaneously important because “or” is the balancing point of alternatives. George can let both parts of the or exist without tension or exclusion.  There is no “either” to George’s “or.”  That would be a fun path to pursue.

I would like to read a whole essay about Lelache, who is, I think, a crux in the novel.  She is introduced in opposition to George just as Dr. Haber is, but she is no Haber.  Her mixed racial background makes her almost a living example of opposites meeting, so much so that her blackness is so crucial to who she is that she cannot exist in the gray-skinned world Haber creates through George’s dreams.  I would love to see an analysis of how Lelache matters to the themes of the novel.  Because I think it’s a critical role she plays.

I want to talk about the opening chapter and how George is like the jellyfish in the ocean.  I want to talk about the Aldebararians and why they look like sea turtles, how they are the eastern mystics, and why they talk out of their left elbow.  I want to make connections between their broken speech and George’s broken speech in the first chapter, in which we get insight into the back story of his broken sentences while the listening characters are clueless.  I want to talk about the snake poison analogy and its implications.  I want to talk about the alien quoting Macbeth and George responding with Hamlet.

There’s so much to think and talk about in this short novel because it is insanely rich and beautifully crafted.  Here, Le Guin is at the top of her game.  Read it and write about all the things I couldn’t, please.